About

The Team

Sebastian Cevallos (Project Manager)
Sebastian is a fourth year Computer Science major and the project manager. Coordinated group meetings and developed architecture for each project to equally distribute workload and achieve deadlines. Responsible for creating the skeleton for each page and communicating requirements for each corresponding team member, then helping with the requirements needing the most assistance.
Juan Castro (Web Designer, Editor)
Juan Castro is a fourth year computer science major. For this project, he focused on web designing and editing, as he created the design, layout, and formatting for the website. He also worked on the narrative, and researched information for government legislation section, inexperienced pilots, and causes of airline incidents.
Willow Friet (Content Developer, Data Visualization)
Willow Friet is a 4th year Mechanical Engineering student and worked as the content developer for the website. Willow created an overall outline for the narrative section, mainly organizing the various sources of information into a flowing argument. Additionally Willow wrote a large portion of the narrative section, particularly the corporations, GDP, and solutions sections. She also created the visualization GDP and created the map of fatalities and military spending.
Hannah Cornejo (Content Developer, Editor)
Hannah Cornejo is a 4th year World Arts and Cultures Major, pursuing a doubling minor in Entrepreneurship and Information Studies & Media Literacy. She structured the beginning outline of the Airline Safety narrative and created the About page of this website. She also formulated research questions, conducted research and created exploratory data visualizations in Tableau.
Ryan Largo (Data Visualization)
Ryan, a fourth year majoring in Statistics and Data Science, played a central role in the collaborative effort. He manually inputted supplementary data to enhance our original dataset’s variation, skillfully crafting maps, bar charts, and line graphs through Tableau. Additionally, Ryan created an insightful timeline exploring the history of U.S. airlines and their crashes attributed to human and mechanical errors.

Sources


The data for this project comes from FiveThirtyEight, an American political media outlet owned by ABC news. FiveThirtyEight sourced their data from a larger database from the Aviation Safety Network, a Flight Safety Foundation service.  Our project works with the FiveThirtyEight dataset while understanding that it may contain bias and may not represent a wholly accurate picture.


By representing a sampling of available data, the FiveThirtyEight dataset encapsulates a multitude of factors, each representing a unique aspect of aviation safety and allows us to view broad trends. In addition to the FiveThirtyEight dataset, we used sources from the Lund University School of Aviation, Journal of Transportation Security, BBC News, and more.
The insights into airline crashes, government policies, and human error from these sources allowed us to analyze patterns in our data along with greater trends. Other sources we used include online articles, dissertations, and reports, all aiming to illuminate the many facets of aviation security

Processing


Our data processing occurred in multiple iterations. First, we set out to add additional data to supplement the data included in the FiveThirtyEight dataset. We located and input GDP, Military Spending, and more data in order to provide more factors for comparison for our review of data. We did this by downloading our dataset and setting it up in Google Sheets.


After this, we cleaned the data and began to create explorative visualizations in Tableau. These explorative visualizations allowed us to test our ideas and find patterns and connections in our data. For each data point, we explored the underlying correlations by employing statistical tools and techniques in Tableau to unearth trends and patterns. In light of the September 11th hijackings, we particularly focused on how government mandates, policies, and military spending might influence aviation safety. We also delved into the dataset on airline incidents, probing whether they were primarily due to human or mechanical errors, or perhaps a complex interplay of both. Our aim was to provide a nuanced perspective on aviation safety. We then created our final visualizations and maps. 

Presentation


This site is made using WordPress. We chose to design a comprehensive, interactive website in order to present our findings with visual appeal. WordPress allowed us to structure our information in a user-friendly manner; organized tabs that guide the user through our project and key pages are linked throughout. Intuitive navigation and easy-to-use interface were key goals of ours when developing this website. Our visual design elements, including color and font, were chosen to be reminiscent of the aviation theme. When combined with our narrative, these visual aids help convey the complexities of aviation safety and the myriad of factors influencing it.

Acknowledgements


This project would not be possible without professor Dr. Sanders and our TA Anna Bonazzi. Thank you for your support –you have our sincere gratitude. After each project milestone, Anna rigorously examined our work to ensure our research was accurate and reliable. We appreciated the attention to detail in her feedback. Dr. Sanders lectures’ and the abundance of digital resources she provided were crucial to the development of this project. The tutorials on how to optimally use Tableau were particularly useful. Additionally, we are grateful to the authors and organizations whose work has greatly informed our research. We appreciate the technological tools and platforms that facilitated our data analysis, visualization, and the creation of our interactive website. In particular, we would like to acknowledge humspace for hosting our website, and you for taking the time to read it!